This application claims priority under 35 U.S.C. xc2xa7 119 of DE 100 10 760.5, filed Mar. 4, 2000 in the German Patent Office.
The present invention relates to laundry detergent and cleaning product shaped bodies that have two or more noncompressed parts.
Laundry detergent or cleaning product shaped bodies are widely described in the prior art and, because of their advantages, have also been accepted commercially and by the consumer.
The customary way of preparing laundry detergent or cleaning product shaped bodies involves preparing particulate premixes that are compressed into tablet form using tableting processes known to the person skilled in the art. However, these methods of preparation have significant disadvantages since pressure-sensitive ingredients may become damaged during the preparation. It has hitherto not been possible to incorporate these ingredients, such as, for example, encapsulated enzymes etc., into tablets without loss of activity. In some cases, even instability or complete inactivity had to be accepted.
In addition, the form of the compressed tablet requires that the ingredients are in direct physical proximity to one another, which in the case of substances that are incompatible, leads to undesired reactions, instabilities, inactivities or loss of active substance.
To solve the abovementioned problems, the prior art has proposed multiphased tablets in which two or more layers are pressed one on top of the other. However, this has the disadvantage that the lower layers are subjected to repeated pressure loading, which leads to impaired solubility. Moreover, said problems were not completely solved thereby since it is not possible to prepare more than three-layer tablets with reasonable technical expenditure.
Further solutions are given in international patent applications WO99/06522, WO99/27063 and WO99/27067, which disclose tablets comprising compressed and noncompressed parts, in which pressure-sensitive substances are incorporated into the noncompressed parts. However, the problems associated with the simultaneous incorporation and separation of two or more pressure-sensitive ingredients are not solved here either. There was therefore still a need to provide improved laundry detergent or cleaning product shaped bodies which combine the highest degree of mechanical stability with good solubility and which, even in the case of design forms having more than three phases, permit economic preparation and the incorporation of pressure-sensitive ingredients.